GNOME 3.24 received most of the hype in snapshot 20170322, but that release also included Mozilla Firefox’s newest 52.0.1 version, which added support for WebAssembly, an emerging standard that brings near-native performance to Web-based games, apps, and software libraries without the use of plugins.

Closing out the month, snapshot 20170331 brought git 2.12.2 that provided a Command Line Interface output fix and python 3.6.1, which provided some bug fixes and updates to documentation. Ruby 2.2 switched to git-branch based patching and patched an exploitable heap overflow vulnerability for CVE-2016-2339. (more…)

Snapshots of openSUSE Tumbleweed are becoming more frequent once again and a new package in the rolling release should make the handling of updates easier.

The new package called transactional-update was announced on the openSUSE Factory Mailing List on Jan. 21 and it allows for more fluent handling of updates and upgrades for a rolling release. Tumbleweed user are encourage to read the email and thread because the package has potential consequences for those using it if not used correctly.

In addition to the Kernel added in the 20170117 snapshot, Flatpak 0.8.0 became available and it is recommended to be used with OSTree 2016.15, which was also added in the snapshot, because of how the package verifies checksums.

Apache 2.4.25 fixed several security issues in the snapshot and added new network protocols options to ease the enabling of http2. Wine’s 2.0 Release Candidate 5 was updated and yast2-bootloader and yast2-storage were both updated.

Many packages made it into openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots this week and two minor kernel versions were just a couple of the several updates that landed in the repositories.

Eight snapshots this week brought both minor and major releases.

Topping the list of updates for snapshot 20161129 was the update to Light Display Manager 1.21.1, which added an Application Programming Interface (API) version to the greeter-daemon protocol for future enhancements. Other updates in the snapshot include openVPN, which added a recommended utility for network and traffic protocols, and subpackages for systemd relevant for 32-bit users. Desktop manager xfdesktop updated to version 4.12.3 and introduced rotating wallpaper images if the images contain rotation information.

The programming language vala, which aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME developers without imposing any additional runtime requirements, updated in the 20161129 and 20161201 snapshots.

Snapshot 20161201 brought the first kernel update of the week with version 4.8.11 and the kernel firmware was updated to 20161121. Tumbleweed user will be happy to see the amount of hplip subpackages added in this snapshot, which brings added support for several hp printers. Several K series subpackages from KDE received updates in the 20161201 snapshot.

The most interesting snapshot of the week probably arrived with snapshot 20161202. In the snapshot, several Mesa 13.0.2 subpackages were updated that provided graphical fixes for enhancing Wayland, Vulkan and X11. FFmpeg 3.2.1 brought new codec fixes and provided a regressions fix for audio-visual loss during streaming.

Git 2.11.0 provides developers several improvements with many new command line and configuration options. Git 2.11 is faster at accessing delta chains in its object database and improves performance of many common operations. (more…)

A new framework for desktop applications on Linux has been added to Tumbleweed and now users can enjoy the most up-to-date version of Flatpak.

Flatpak 0.6.13 arrived in the 20161028 snapshot last week and complements another package updated in the snapshot; OSTree 2016.12, which is a tool that combines a “git-like” model for committing and downloading bootable filesystem trees, along with a layer for deploying them and managing the bootloader configuration.

The “new feature will surely need some testing,” wrote Dominique Leuenberger, in his weekly review about Tumbleweed to the Factory Mailing List.